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A large fraction of Manchester United fans will never forgive the Glazer family for what they have done to their club.

In the seven seasons since the takeover in 2005, the club has won the Premier League title four times and been runners up the remaining three times. They have also reached the Champions League final three times and won it once. It would not be foolish to argue that, on the field, this is the most successful seven years period in the club’s history.

So what are the fans upset about? I think there are two aspects- culture and finance. The cultural argument is that the Glazers have betrayed the spirit of the club by turning it into a money making machine.

This argument is fairly hollow given that Manchester United a been a highly commercialized enterprise since at least 1991 when it floated on the stock exchange, and arguably well before that under the ownership of the Edwards family. Many United fans deny it, but anti-Glazer comments often seem tinged with anti-Americanism.

If you press people on this point, the argument you often get is that football in general needs to be regulated, tickets prices controlled to make them affordable to “ordinary” fans, wages controlled and some kind of salary cap introduced to level the playing field.

This is hard to fathom on two levels. First, salary caps are a feature of American sports leagues and serve as a means of restricting salaries so as to enable the owners to run their clubs at a profit – rampant commercialism!

Second, wage controls would surely make Manchester United a less dominant team- is that really what the fans want? In the last six seasons for which we have data, Manchester United has had either the second or third largest payroll in English football.

The finance argument has three elements to it. The first is that the fans were fleeced by higher ticket prices. There is some justice in this. The Glazers saw the United had some of the lowest ticket prices in the EPL and increased matchday income per fan by around 30% within a year of taking over. However, since then the increases have been modest.

The second is that the debt placed the club at risk of insolvency, so common in English football. With hindsight that risk never seems to have been that real, and after the IPO it is surely minimal. The club says that the use of the proceeds will reduce net debt to £345 million; the club’s income in 2010/11 was £331 million and after the new mega-TV deal, it will be far higher than this. This is not unsustainable.

Nonetheless, anxiety caused by the perception of risk constitutes real suffering. Even if the fans were wrong to worry, they did worry.

But the most interesting argument is the third one- money was stripped out of the club which would otherwise have been available to fund player acquisition. It’s hard to say exactly how much money the glazers have taken out of United. Between 2006 and 2011 the accounts show net interest payments of £253 million.

Peak debt, according to Andy Green, was around £500 million and has been reduced by about £100 million. All of the financial transactions have been very costly, involving big fees for bankers, etc. so a conservative estimate might be £500 million that the club otherwise have had.